Our Cleansing In Christ

Malachi 3:2-4

But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner's fire and a fuller's soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; He will purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the LORD an offering in righteousness.

The work of Jesus Christ in our lives is both judicial and continuing. He came to legislate the righteous standards of God and to implement them in our lives in an ongoing process. The judicial work of Christ on the Cross is one that all of us who know Him as our Savior appreciate. It's the ongoing work that many of us have a tendency to buck against.

This may be a shock to some but it's still true. There's not a perfect one among us. There's a few who think they are but that just proves the truth of this to the rest of us. None of us are perfectly perfected yet and all of us who have entered into the Kingdom of Christ through the Door of Christ's own self are in the process of perfection.

Our Scripture in Malachi talks about the process of purification and cleansing and describes it as a fire that is hot enough to burn the impurities out of precious metals and harsh enough to cleanse the soil and stains from garments.

If one of our children falls into a sewer, what parent among us would not immediately reach down and lift our child out of the stinch? That's what the Lord does when He saves us through His work on the cross.

What parent among us would leave our rescued child to wear the pollution from the sewer? Not one of us. Neither will the Lord sit by and leave us to continue in the things that brought us spiritual death - things that mar His image stamped upon us when He rescued us through the saving work of Jesus Christ. That's the ongoing work of Christ in our lives.

There are a lot of things that we leave behind us when we come to Christ. A lot of things are easy to repent of. There are also things that we bring with us when we come to Christ that are not so easy to repent of and have to be worked on.

It's God's desire that all our attitudes and actions become a reflection of His attitudes and actions. Trials that come in the way of circumstances or people, whether sent from the Lord or allowed by the Lord, are intended as the refiner's fire and the fuller's soap as opportunities for purifying and cleansing from attitudes and actions that are less than the standards set by His attitudes and actions.

Love, toward God and toward others, is the evidence that we have been purified and cleansed of the inner thoughts and intents that are works of the flesh which alienate us from God and from those around us.

May the Spirit of Christ, by whatever means necessary, groom us to model the quality of love represented where Jesus said, For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.

COPYRIGHT - Dave Kralik

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